I’m excited to show you Delegate and get your feedback!
Why I built this: I hate email. I’ve struggled for years with extremely low signal to noise in my email inboxes. I get 20+ emails a day and most are spam, marketing, cold outreach, or other things I don’t care about and an unsubscribe purge rarely helps. Some emails are hyper-important and/or urgent, so I’d bounce between getting notified constantly or switching them off and missing important emails. Filters and other tools have never fully worked for me and tend to be very brittle.
The way Delegate works is that you tell it what’s important to you. I have instructions like:
- Never show me cold outreach from sales people
- For location-based security emails from apps, ignore them if it’s in my city, otherwise tell me immediately
- Include any sales on my wishlists in my briefing
- Send on any email-based MFA codes immediately (it tends to get them to me before they even show up in my email app)
Then when each email arrives, it reads it with my instructions in mind and follows this flow:
1. Important and urgent? Notify immediately
2. Important, not urgent? Put in morning summary
3. Not important? Ignore
It’s completely changed my relationship to email, but I don’t think this approach is for everyone or even most people. You probably already know by now if you’d find this helpful.
Right now, Delegate’s interface is a Telegram bot and operates based on email forwarding. I’m exploring other options for the frontend (Discord, mobile app), and since I know privacy and security is a huge concern for email, I’m also looking at building a self-hosted backend option. There’s also a laundry list of features I aim to build like sending quick responses easily, embedding emails for retrieval so you can ask Delegate to find anything you need, managing calendar, etc.
If you want to read more about the why and how, here’s a longer blog post: https://www.ideafuel.io/why-i-built-delegate-the-email-assis... Here’s a direct link to the Telegram bot itself: https://t.me/DelegateUltrabot
I would really love to hear any and all thoughts and feedback on the concept, approach, and especially if there’s interest in an open-source, self-hosted version (ideally complete with local LLM for all processing).